Election 2024: The Republican National Convention Begins on Monday

Republicans are in an upbeat mood as their National Convention opens in Milwaukee on Monday. It’s not because they have seen the sizable polling bump they hoped for after Joe Biden’s halting debate performance last month. The presidential race remains tight, even in battleground states. Republican optimism instead stems from the fact that Donald Trump controls his convention while Biden is fighting for his political life.

The Republican Convention should be a no surprise affair. The four-day schedule has been carefully scripted. Each night will focus on one of the convention’s four themes. Monday is “Make America Wealthy Once Again.” Tuesday is “Make America Safe Once Again.” Wednesday is “Make America Strong Once Again.” And Thursday night, when Trump will accept the nomination and give his speech, is “Make America Great Again Once Again.”

Trump’s nomination will almost certainly end up by acclamation. This week, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley released the ninety-seven delegates she won during her failed campaign, saying, “I encourage my delegates to support Donald Trump next week in Milwaukee.” Haley won’t be joining them there, however. She wasn’t invited to the convention. (Update: Over the weekend Haley was invited to the convention. She will address the delegates on Tuesday night.) 

The convention’s one unknown element is who Trump will name as his running mate. Media speculation has centered on Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, and Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio. Trump has record of unpredictably, so he might throw a curveball on his nominee. But if one of the three rumored candidates is his choice, they can expect to be reminded of the anti-Trump comments they have made in the past. Burgum, a former businessman, said just last year that he wouldn’t do business with Trump because “it’s important that you’re judged by the company you keep." Rubio in 2016 famously questioned the size of Trump’s hands and called him a “con artist.” Vance has said Trump is an “idiot,” told a college friend that Trump might be “America’s Hitler,” and said that he believed a woman who accused Trump of rape.

The convention may focus attention on Trump’s campaign platform, which was approved this week. The platform is just fourteen pages long and employs the same idiosyncratic approach to capitalization that Trump favors in his social media posts. It is dedicated to “The Forgotten Men and Women of America,” conveying Trump’s claim that he is running a populist campaign that will advance the interests of Americans ignored by Washington elites. Trump may not know it, but the phrase has a long history in U.S. politics. A version of it dates back to at least 1883. Franklin Delano Roosevelt popularized the phrase “the forgotten man” in his first run for the presidency in 1932.

The preamble to the platform, which is titled “America First: A Return to Common Sense,” hails Trump as “an unapologetic Champion of the American People.” It summarizes the platform with twenty pledges, which include “LARGE TAX CUTS FOR WORKERS, AND NO TAX ON TIPS” and “PREVENT WORLD WAR THREE, RESTORE PEACE IN EUROPE AND IN THE MIDDLE EAST, AND BUILD A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY—ALL MADE IN AMERICA.” The pledges were crafted, as Axios put it, “to either electrify his base or entice the micro-groups of persuadable voters his campaign is focused on.”

The platform itself is long on making promises and short on recognizing trade-offs. For example, it pledges to “quickly bring down all prices” while vowing to make “Tariffs on Foreign Producers go up.” But higher tariffs mean higher prices. Think about it for a moment. If foreign goods weren’t cheaper, they wouldn’t be imported. And no matter how many times Trump says it, higher tariffs will not mean that “Taxes on American Workers, Families, and Businesses can come down.” Tariffs are taxes on all three. Full stop. Indeed, the cost of Trump’s tariffs to the average American family could run as high as $1,700 a year. And unlike traditional Republican Party platforms, the 2024 platform says nothing about shrinking the federal budget deficit or shrinking the size of the national debt. Indeed, the policies it champions, most notably making Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent, will increase both the federal deficit and the national debt.

In all likelihood, however, Election 2024 will remain a campaign that is less about issues and policy prescriptions and more about personalities and partisanship. Which is not a reason to be upbeat.

Campaign Update

Trump’s sentencing for his thirty-four felony convictions in New York state court has been pushed back to September 18. Judge Juan Merchan ordered the delay in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling on July 1 that presidents enjoy a substantial degree of immunity from criminal charges. Trump’s lawyers have filed a brief arguing that the Supreme Court’s decision means that his New York convictions and the underlying indictment should be tossed out. If Merchan agrees to both claims, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office would be barred from retrying Trump.

An official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told reporters on Tuesday that Russia is continuing its efforts to help Trump as well as congressional candidates who oppose continued aid for Ukraine. Conversely, the intelligence official said that China does not appear to be trying "to influence the outcome of the presidential race" because it views “both major parties as being opposed to China and seeking to contain China.”

What the Candidates Are Saying

Biden has spent much of the past two weeks fighting to quell a rebellion in the Democratic ranks after his calamitous performance at the June 27 presidential debate. If proponents of finding a new party nominee thought he would quietly throw in the towel, they misjudged their man. Biden came out swinging earlier this week in defense of his candidacy. He sent congressional Democrats a letter on Monday, stating that “I am firmly committed to staying in the race, to running this race to the end, and to beating Donald Trump.” He also called into MSNBC’s Morning Joe to make the case for his continued candidacy. He railed against “elites” calling on him to step aside and said, “I’m not going anywhere.”

Biden followed up those efforts with an hour-long press conference last night. Under normal circumstances, the focus would have been on what he said about Ukraine, NATO’s future, and Gaza among other issues. But in the shadow of the June 27 debate, the media’s focus was on his insistence that he will “finish the job.”

Biden’s defiance has slowed, at least for the moment, calls from Democratic lawmakers that he step aside. (The fact the NATO summit was this week may have contributed as well.) As of this morning, just eighteen Democratic members of Congress have publicly urged him to withdraw. But the defiance hasn’t ended the media’s saturation coverage of his predicament. Nor has it stopped prominent backers from saying that his time has passed or donors from freezing their campaign contributions. Even the support Biden is getting from lawmakers who back his candidacy sometimes sounds like a coded invitation to exit the race.

The challenge for Biden is that concerns about his age and fitness aren’t going away. His every word is being parsed for evidence that June 27 signaled a condition rather than an episode. His press conference last night contained the sorts of verbal flubs—he at one point referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump”—that have been present throughout his political career (and that Trump and even much younger people also routinely make). However unfair, neither his adversaries nor some of his supporters will cut him any slack.

Democratic leaders recognize that the longer the “will-he-stay-or-will-he-go” conversation lasts, the harder it is to make their case against Trump, regardless of who the nominee is. So, they may be in the worst of all worlds. Upping the pressure on Biden to step aside risks a bruising internal party fight that hands victory to Trump. Even if Democratic leaders persuade Biden to give way to a new generation of leadership, they will have relatedly little time to build a consensus around his successor.  

Complicating matters is the fact that the Democratic nominee may be formally decided in less than three weeks. While the Democratic National Convention doesn’t begin until August 19, Democrats are set to nominate Biden in a virtual rollcall vote that could take place as early as the end of this month. Democrats scheduled the vote when it appeared that Biden might be left off the ballot in Ohio because that state was poised to sets its ballot before the Democratic Convention started. However, last month Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed a bill that ensured that the Democratic nominee will appear on the Ohio ballot. (It took a special session of the Republican-controlled state legislature to do it, and the decision was eased by the fact that Biden isn’t likely to win Ohio.)

Where Democrats have been quick to comment on Biden’s predicament, Trump has been, by his standards at least, restrained. He appeared on Hannity on Fox News on Monday night and limited himself to saying that he expects Biden to resist calls to leave the race: “He’s got an ego, and he doesn’t want to quit. He doesn’t want to do that.” Trump was in more typical form at a rally in Florida the following night where he alleged that the White House was hiding Biden’s declining health in “the biggest cover up in political history." 

Besides commenting on Biden’s predicament, Trump took to Truth Social to disavow the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which has produced a nearly nine-hundred-page report laying out the hardline conservatives policies that a Republican president should enact upon taking office in January 2025:

Trump didn’t explain how he could both “know nothing about Project 2025” and “disagree with some of the things” it recommends. If Trump truly has “no idea who is behind it,” then he hasn’t been talking to the people he asked to write the Republican Party platform. The platform committee's policy director and deputy policy director both helped develop Project 2025. Trump also seemed to have forgotten that he said two years ago that the Heritage Foundation was “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”

What the Pundits Are Saying

Vanity Fair’s Joe Hagan profiled Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. It wasn’t a flattering portrait. Some of what Hagan reported is well known, like Kennedy’s heroin addiction from the ages of fifteen to twenty-nine. Other incidents, like texting nude photos of women and groping a family babysitter, were not. When asked to respond to the latter allegation, Kennedy said, “I am not a church boy.” He added, “I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world."

Politico’s Michael Hirsh interviewed former Trump national security officials and potential future Trump officials term about Trump’s likely approach to NATO. Hirsh concluded that Trump would radically reorient NATO rather than abandon it. That reorientation would mean that “the U.S. would keep its nuclear umbrella over Europe during a second Trump term by maintaining its airpower and bases in Germany, England and Turkey, and its naval forces as well. Meanwhile, the bulk of infantry, armor, logistics and artillery would ultimately pass from American to European hands.” 

The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta interviewed top Trump campaign officials and concluded that they built their campaign around the perception that Biden is too old to be president. The result, in Alberta’s view, is that Biden’s departure from the race “would necessitate a dramatic reset—not just for the Democratic Party, but for Trump’s campaign.” Senior Trump campaign officials insist “that any Democratic replacement would inherit the president’s deficiencies” and that “Trump’s blueprint for victory would remain essentially unchanged,” Alberta writes. “But they know that’s not true. They know their campaign has been engineered in every way—from the voters they target to the viral memes they create—to defeat Biden. And privately, they are all but praying that he remains their opponent.”

What the Polls Show

A Pew Research Center poll found that 58 percent of Americans hold a favorable view of NATO. That support trails what Pew found in eight of the other twelve NATO member countries it polled, and it is far behind the 91 percent favorability rating of NATO in Poland. The poll also found that Americans remain split on support for Ukraine. Twenty-four percent said the United States is doing “too little,” 25 percent said it is doing “about the right amount,” 31 percent say it is “doing too much,” and 20 percent said they didn’t know or declined to answer. 

RealClear’s average of national polls has Trump with a lead of slightly more than three percentage points over Biden. Semafor’s Dave Weigel notes that this is the “first time in 24 years that the GOP nominee has led after the July 4 holiday, going into conventions.”

A poll of likely voters in Wisconsin found that Trump leads Biden by six percentage points, 44 percent to 38 percent. Conducted after the June 27 presidential debate, the poll registered Kennedy with 9 percent support, other third-party candidates with 4 percent support combined, and just 5 percent of voters undecided.

The Campaign Schedule

The Republican National Convention opens in Milwaukee on Monday (July 15, 2024).

The Democratic National Convention opens in Chicago in thirty-eight days (August 19, 2024).

The second presidential debate is in sixty days (September 10, 2024)

Donald Trump’s sentencing hearing on his New York felony convictions is in sixty-eight days (September 18, 2024).

The first in-person absentee voting in the nation begins in Minnesota and South Dakota in seventy days (September 20, 2024).

Election Day is 116 days away.

Inauguration Day is 192 days away.

Shelby Sires assisted in the preparation of this post.